Getting the News from Citizen Kane

As written and played by Orson Welles in the 1941 classic that many people judge to be the greatest movie ever made, the life of Charles Foster Kane begins and ends with poetry. The first and probably most memorable instance comes in the newsreel coverage of Kane's death that follows the film's opening "Rosebud" sequence, where Kane's estate is compared to Xanadu of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Kubla Khan." Coleridge's lines, "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure dome decree," appear onscreen a la title card and are followed by a series of scenes of Kane's luxurious estate with a voice-over reading:

Legendary was the Xanadu where Kubla Khan decreed his stately pleasure dome. Today, almost as legendary is Florida's Xanadu, world's largest private pleasure grounds. Here on the deserts of the Gulf Coast, a private mountain was commissioned and successfully built...

What's interesting about this "News on the March" voice-over is that the narrator actually misquotes the original "Kubla Khan," untangling the inverted syntax of Coleridge's line ("a stately pleasure dome decree") only to replace it with the inverted syntax of the news ("Legendary was the Xanadu"). This spectacular moment not only has the effect of turning the news into poetry and poetry into prose—a totally fitting twist for the newspaperman's obituary—but also, in introducing two ways of saying the Coleridge poem, figures the conflicted narratives at the center of Kane's tragic life: a man who could afford to buy anything but who wanted what money couldn't buy; a man who was a success in business but not in life, etc.

We encounter poetry a second time when we first meet Kane at the beginning of his career—a young man, played by Welles, in the office of the New York Inquirer, that feisty, rag-tag daily which gave Kane his start in the newspaper biz. In this scene (pictured below), Kane is no longer the young boy (Buddy Swan) playing in the snow out West and being removed to parts East for a proper upbringing, but a cocksure, idealistic underdog using his paper, in good Progressive-Era muckraking fashion, to root out corporate fraud and advocate on behalf of the poor. Kane's former guardian, Walter Thatcher (George Coulouris) of the legal firm Thatcher & Company, comes to see Kane to protest what he sees as the Inquirer's unfair coverage of these and other items and, while Thatcher's there, Kane is brought a telegram by personal business manager, Mr. Bernstein (Everett Sloane). Bernstein doesn't want to read the cable aloud, but Kane insists. Here's that passage:

Kane: We have no secrets from our readers, Mr. Bernstein. Mr. Thatcher is one of our most devoted readers. He knows what's wrong with every copy of the Inquirer since I took over. Read the cable.

Bernstein (reading): GIRLS DELIGHTFUL IN CUBA STOP COULD SEND YOU PROSE POEMS ABOUT SCENERY BUT DONT FEEL LIKE SPENDING YOUR MONEY STOP THERE IS NO WAR IN CUBA. Signed Wheeler. Any answer?

Kane: Yes: "Dear Wheeler, You provide the prose poems, I'll provide the war."

Bernstein: That's fine, Mr. Kane.

Kane: Yes, I rather like it myself.

As we've mentioned before—via the "poem- ulations" of Emily Dickinson, Chum Frink, and James Metcalfe—prose poetry was no stranger to the daily news, but here Welles is actually leaving those poems unwritten; if the movie transformed news into poetry and poetry into prose early on, here it intervenes to prevent poetic composition in the first place, once again rewriting the poet as the newspaper editor, with the exception that both now deal in prose rather than in the verse of "Kubla Khan." Furthermore, it is Kane's news service that's granted power to make and create, able to conjure up wars (or pleasure domes) where none exist—a capability once associated with poetry and of particular concern to "Kubla Khan." In a sense, Kane takes the modernist cry to "Make it new!" and rewrites it as, "Make it news!"

In "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower," William Carlos Williams famously wrote, "It is difficult / to get the news from poems..." People have offered all sorts of reasons why that might or might not be the case, but Citizen Kane offers us yet another possibility: that people do in fact get the news from poems, and part of that news is that American newspapers are the new poetry. From the perspective of 2010, by which point in time both poetry and newspapers have been pronounced dead or dying, that's one Xanadu, perhaps, that even Samuel Taylor Coleridge's mythical bard couldn't call back.

Poetry & Pop Culture Heroes: Firefly, Sci-Fi, & the Latterday Chronicles of Lewis Turco

In Joss Whedon's short-lived, much- acclaimed, 2002 TV series Firefly, the show's main characters repeatedly refer to "The Universe" as "The 'verse"—an abbreviation that suggests, to Poetry & Popular Culture at least, that outer space is one big poem and that Captain Malcolm Reynolds and his team of intergalactic space cowboys have set out to read it all.

This overlap of poetry and science fiction isn't new to Firefly, though. While we were browsing the used books section at the local Book Bin, for example, we came across a stack of decrepit old magazines including the issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction from February 1962 pictured below. On taking a look at it, we landed on a poem by Lewis Turco—a University of Iowa Writers' Workshop graduate and prolific author of a bunch of books including eleven poetry collections and The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics. Turns out, Turco—who also writes under the pseudonym Wesli Court—penned "Excerpts from The Latterday Chronicle" while studying under Paul Engle and Donald Justice at Iowa. This struck the P&PC office interns as kind of odd, for when they think of poets trained at the Writers' Workshop, they don't at all imagine them wanting to publish in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. So we caught up with Turco and asked him to explain himself.

Poetry & Popular Culture: Can you explain yourself?

Lewis Turco: Sure. I wasn't "trained" at the Workshop, I was almost entirely self-taught. I was publishing poems in my home-town paper's poetry column all through high school, and when I graduated in 1952, I went into the Navy for four years where I bought and studied prosody books and anthologies of modern poetry. I began publishing in the "little" magazines when I was 19 years old...

P&PC: Wait a minute. What do you mean you wrote for the local paper? Did you write good bad poetry?

LT: You bet. In my teens I was a high school correspondent and cub reporter for the Meriden, CT, Morning Record, and I was the morgue clerk—the "morgue" is the clippings file that newspapers kept of their stories which were clipped out and filed for future reference. I won a local fiction prize in 1949 and that story was my first publication in a local paper. From then on I wrote all sorts of things, including news items and verse for the local papers.

P&PC: Sorry to interrupt. Back to sea.

LT: In the Navy, I was a yeoman—not an English farmer but an office clerk—and sailed around the world (actually) aboard an aircraft carrier, the Hornet. There's nothing for a clerk to do at sea, so I read a lot and wrote a lot—the ship had a good library. By the time I got out of the Navy and went to college, I was already better published than many of my teachers at UConn. In college, after the Navy, besides receiving the G.I. Bill (which is why I'd enlisted), I was awarded two scholarships by the Record newspaper. The reason I got into the Workshop was because of my publication record.

P&PC: "Excerpts from the Latterday Chronicle" (pictured to the left) wasn't the first poem you'd published in Fantasy and Science Fiction either. What did people make of this habit?

LT: While I was a grad student in the Workshop, I submitted two poems to F&SF, which I'd been reading since issue one. Both were accepted, and the first, "A Great Grey Fantasy," was published almost immediately, in January of 1960. "Excerpts" wasn't published until 1962. I don't remember people having any reaction to either poem. The Workshop people would have sneered if they'd known about it, and academics didn't read sci-fi or fantasy then, though they do now.

P&PC: But Engle had just written a libretto for a Hallmark Hall of Fame opera, A Christmas Opera, by Philip Bezanson, which aired in 1960. Would Engle have sneered too?

JT: I'm sure he would not have. In fact, I was his Editorial Assistant in the Workshop at the time, working on a Hallmark anthology, Poetry for Pleasure, and another for Random House, Midland: Twenty-Five Years of Fiction and Poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, so I may have shown him "A Great Grey Fantasy," though maybe not—he was gone off campus so much.

P&PC: Where's the rest of The Latter Day Chronicle?

LT: There is no more. The "Excerpts" were merely meant to suggest the rest of it.

P&PC: We're used to talking about "genre fiction." What would it mean to talk about "genre poetry" as well? You know, "I read a lot of sci-fi poetry..."

LT: I don't know if it still exists, but there used to be a Science Fiction Poetry Association located in Los Angeles. They published a magazine called Star*Line, and I used to publish there and in their Rhysling Anthology of prize poems. But you know, this idea of "genre" writing annoys the hell out of me. Edgar Allan Poe wrote fantasy poetry, and so have poets throughout history. Anybody ever read Beowulf or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, or "La Belle Dame sans Merci" or The Faerie Queene, or "The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner," or "A Midsummer Night's Dream"? Gimme a break.

P&PC: Well, what's the future hold for such poetry then?

LT: Last night my wife and I went to see the new movie Avatar. It's a great sci-fi/fantasy flick, the biggest one ever and great fun. I suspect that writers of all kinds are going to keep on writing imaginative literature in every genre. When I was teaching, I used to tell my students, "Writing is writing." There will continue to be good writing in every genre.

P&PC: Live long and prosper, then.

LT: May the force be with you.

Did Dashiell Hammett Hate Poetry?

We here at Poetry & Popular Culture might offer a sawbuck for hard evidence to prove it, because we think he did—hated it like a private dick hates a glass that's half empty or a heart that's too full. And if Hammett didn't hate it, then the hard-boiled Continental Op of Hammett's fictional San Francisco Continental Detective Agency sure did. Which makes sense—as much sense as a skirt in heels and the flatfoot hot on her tail. After all, what use does a private eye have for poetry—the genre that obscures, covers its tracks, revels in riddles, and deals in metaphor? A dick deals in facts, untangles riddles, sorts out mystery. He may have gum on his shoes, but he doesn't need his toenails to twinkle.

Poetry and the P.I., it would seem, are as incompatible as a chili dog and a just-pressed shirt. Exhibit A: Red Harvest from 1929, in which the Continental Op is hired to clean up Personville, a town so corrupt that most people know it as Poisonville. Seems that Personville's original gangsta—Old Elihu Willsson, who owns the bank, newspapers, a senator and the governor—is losing ground in his old age. The Op is reluctant to stick around and do the dirty work, so Old Elihu appeals to the Op's manhood. "I'll talk you your sense," he says. "I want a man to clean this pig-sty of a Poisonville for me, to smoke out the rats, little and big. Its a man's job. Are you a man?"

But the Op retorts:

What's the use of getting poetic about it? If you've got a fairly honest piece of work to be done in my line, and you want to pay a decent price, maybe I'll take it on. But a lot of foolishness about smoking rats and pig-pens doesn't mean anything to me.

In the Op's calculus, the values of money and honesty overlap with clear speaking; foolishness, rats, and pig-pens, on the other hand, line up with poetry.

Exhibit B: The Dain Curse, also from 1929, in which the Continental Op returns to investigate a string of mysterious deaths that follow Gabrielle Leggett wherever she goes. The people using Gabrielle as cover explain to her that her bad luck is the product of a family curse, an explanation Gabrielle buys but which the Op thinks is a bunch of hooey—about as real as a peroxide blonde. Check out this exchange with Fitzstephan, a novelist interested in psychoanalysis who becomes the Op's drinking acquaintance and sounding board:

Fitzstephan drank beer and asked:

"You'd reduce the Dain curse, then, to a primitive strain in the blood?"

"To less than that, to words in an angry woman's mouth."

"It's fellows like you that take all the color out of life." He sighed behind cigarette smoke. "Doesn't Gabrielle's being made the tool for her mother's murder convince you of the necessity—at least the poetic necessity—of the curse?"

"Not even if she was the tool, and that's something I wouldn't bet on."

In hindsight, this passage becomes even more damning of poetry (not to mention psychoanalysis) when it turns out that Fitzstephan himself is actually the murderer who's been framing Gabrielle. So not only does poetry come up short because it's not the "tangible, logical, and jailable answer" that the Op seeks, but in The Dain Curse it's the very language of criminal activity. Even novelist-criminals speak it!

It's clear that the Continental Op's factual, logic-based approach to solving crime extends to language as well. When he reports in The Dain Curse, for example, that "Her face didn't tell me anything. It was distorted but in a way that might have meant almost anything," he's talking about the act of reading—the inability to read. And regardless of whether he's reading poetry or a suspect's face, distortion and indeterminacy almost always get in his way. The irony of all this, of course, is that the Continental Op's own language is so colorful at times that he himself could be called downright poetic. In fact, one character in Red Harvest calls him on this. "My God!" she exclaims, "for a fat, middle-aged, hard-boiled, pig-headed guy, you've got the vaguest way of doing things I ever heard of." What happens to this truth teller? It's no surprise to P&PC that she ends up dead as a doornail.

"This is a Year for Luck and Joy": New Year's Greetings from Poetry & Popular Culture

We here at the Poetry & Popular Culture Office like New Year celebrations a lot, in part because they make us remember the carrier's greeting or carrier's address—that rhyming summary of the year's events which 18th- and 19th-century newspaper printer's devils composed and handed out in search of some walking around money to take into the new year. If you don't know of this tradition, then you should check out the collection from the Harris Collection of American Poetry and Plays that Brown University has made available online. As you browse the 900 examples there, be sure to also take in the great introductory essays by Mary T. Russo and Leon Jackson, and consider for a moment how the year-end (Christmas) tip you leave for the people who deliver your newspaper or mail in fact has its roots in practices established more than two centuries ago.

The 1933 carrier's address presented here—an illustrated calendar that people could hang in their homes year-round (to the left)—is worth noting for a variety of reasons. (The month-by-month calendar is under the poem.) First, it suggests that the form, at least in name, extended further into the 20th century than most folks tend to think. The elaborate and sometimes epic accounts of the previous year's news-worthy events got shortened, greetings got more general, and the tip the delivery boy sought got rerouted through the circuits of commercial infrastructure. Greetings increasingly came from from the papers themselves, coming in the form of promotional materials that established the business/company name as the primary point of contact between producer and consumer (and not the names of specific printers' apprentices, once often included on the poems they authored and distributed but obscured here by the generic job title of "Your Carrier Boy").

In the process of this trans- formation, the wide- spread, compar- atively secular practice of sending New Year's greetings gradually got pulled into the orbit of the Christmas holidays, thus making the carriers' seasonal rhymes—and this is a second item of interest to note—part of the prehistory of the 20th-century Christmas card. (American Greetings was founded in 1906 and Hallmark in 1910; along with the automobile, the airplane, the x-ray, the machine gun and the safety razor, the commercially-produced greeting card is pretty much a modern invention.) We here at the P&PC Office see this publishing shift in fact being subtly acknowledged in the phrase "New cards are being dealt" in line five of the poem here.)

At the same time that the carrier's greeting was morphing in this direction, another ubiquitous and poetry-related print item, the farmer's almanac, began to change as well. As more and more people migrated to, or came within the easy reach of, urban centers, they still needed calendars but no longer needed the elaborate apparatus that almanacs usually offered—planting information, cycles of the moon, meteorological information, jokes, home remedies, bits and piece of useful information, etc. As this material dropped away, the poetry and calendar remained. Given the newly shortened form of the carrier's greeting and the simplified almanac—this is our third item of note—it was natural that the two would come together, at least for a time, to produce the sort of hybrid form that the Evening Star circulated. True, this specific greeting still retains its New Year's orientation, but there are others with Christmas-related messages (some of which were being delivered by postal workers who, in addition to delivery boys, were seeking seasonal tips). As the century went on, the two forms would eventually disentangle themselves from each other, leaving us with New Year calendars on one hand and rhyming Christmas cards on the other.

So as you go out and sing "Auld Lang Syne" by Robert Burns tonight, keep in mind the long tradition of American poetry that also ushered in the new year. As the recession carries on, it seems appropriate to look back to 1933 in welcoming 2010:

New cards are dealt, so let us play
Our hands for all they're worth, and say
"This is a year for luck and joy,
God bless us all—
YOUR CARRIER BOY

Happy New Year from the the P&PC Office.

Happy Hooverized Xmas Greetings from the Poetry & Popular Culture Office

A year ago, the Poetry & Popular Culture Office took a look at the fine-art Christmas cards that Robert Frost and master printer Joseph Blumenthal made for friends and patrons for nearly thirty years from 1935 to 1962. Those cards are now the subject of an exhibition running from December 2-January 16 at Poets House library and literary center in New York. We wish we could be on hand to help celebrate.

Since we can't be there, we're going to offer a subject for next year's holiday exhibition at Poets House: the Hooverized Christmas card (pictured above). Printed on unrefined card stock and bound with a piece of twine, this 1918 product of New Jersey's Campbell Art Company satirizes Herbert Hoover not for anything Depression-related (that was still to come), but for Hoover's actions as Woodrow Wilson's head of the U.S. Food Administration during World War One. Believing that "food will win the war," Hoover led all sorts of efforts to curtail American food consumption and organized shipments of food to starving portions of Europe—acts that made him respected and even beloved around the world and that paved the way for his 58% to 40% shellacking of Al Smith in the 1928 Presidential election. (For more on the poetry of World War One food rationing, check out Chapter 4 of Mark W. Van Wienen's Partisans and Poets: The Political Work of American Poetry in the Great War.)

The rhyme on the Campbell Art Company's card (pictured to the left) is clever and timely, printed in the same red ink as the cover. In these lines, Hoover's plea to be economical finds expression not only in a scaled-back lifestyle but in the abbreviated language of the poem itself: the "+" instead of "and" used in line one, the "X" instead of "Christ" in "Xmas," the use of M.C. and H.N.Y., etc.:

I've Hooverized on Pork + Beans
And Butter cake and Bread
I've cut out Auto-riding
And now I walk instead.
I've Hooverized on Sugar,
On Coal and Light and Lard
And here's my Xmas Greeting
On a Hoover Xmas Card

I wish you a very
M.C. and a H.N.Y.

Ultimately, though, what's so funny about this card is its actual excess, which is perhaps a particularly American way of expressing anger at having to ration or cut back. Not only does the card use eight lines of poetry to explain the actual two-line holiday greeting, but its twine "binding" is entirely gratuitous, as the card—simply a piece of cardboard folded in half—has no immediate use for it. The Campbell Art Company doesn't stop there, however, but amplifies the joke by captioning the binding "Camouflaged Ribbon"—a Saussurian move that resonates with the red bird that is captioned "Bluebird" here and that also seems to anticipate Rene Magritte's famous pipe (The Treachery of Images) which wouldn't not be for another ten years.

With that said, then, H.H. from the entire P&PC Office, and B.W. for a H.N.Y.

How Can Santa Claus Make a Profit?

—Appeared in the Salem Statesman-Journal on December 21, 2009, the Tallahassee Democrat on December 24, 2009, and the Iowa City Press-Citizen on December 25, 2009

Early on in his career
he asked that question too—
hooked Rudolph up to a circuit board
until the red nose blew,

packaged reindeer meat for sale
and billed it as organic,
and had the elves work every day
in a constant state of panic.

He brought in scabs to break the unions
and raised insurance fees.
He said there needed to be more jobs
then sent them overseas.

Then he looked at himself in the mirror.
He was old and fat.
Making a profit had turned him grey
and the reindeer called him "Rat!"

During the stroke he saw the light
and vowed to take up giving.
He doesn't make a profit now.
Instead, he makes a living.

Spending for Vast Returns: Colleen Coyne Reviews Jess Walter's Novel "The Financial Lives of the Poets"

Poetry & Popular Culture Correspondent Colleen Coyne writes in from Minneapolis where she is completing an M.F.A. in creative writing at the University of Minnesota. Self-identifying on Facebook as "Optimistically Agnostic," she ultimately finds something in The Financial Lives of the Poets that readers can believe in. That and an investment tip or two.

Earlier this winter, Chicagoland publisher Sourcebooks, Inc. launched PoetrySpeaks, a website selling text, audio, and video of individual poems for $0.99-$1.99 a pop. (Think iTunes for poetry.) Call me cynical, but as much as I want it to be, poetry is rarely profitable. Despite conventional wisdom, PoetrySpeaks is betting on a huge audience of willing and eager, iPod-toting poetry-purchasers to pony up the big bucks—or at least enough dough to keep 'em afloat.

Only a fool would take that wager. But in Jess Walter’s latest novel, The Financial Lives of the Poets, former business journalist Matt Prior has done just that, literally betting the whole house on his pipe-dream Poetfolio.com, a website that delivers financial news via poetry—with disastrous and hilarious consequences.

We first meet 46-year-old Matt, slipper-clad and sleep-deprived, on a midnight 7-11 milk run. He’s out of a job; he’s pretty sure his wife is cheating on him; he’s a caretaker to his two little boys and dementia-ridden father; and he’s a week away from losing his house because of the categorical failure of his “money lit” website. With little time to make everything right, what’s a guy to do? Hook up with some local stoners and become a drug dealer, of course—all in the name of salvaging his marriage, saving his house, and bringing his life back from the brink of ruin.

Matt is responsibility gone rogue, a “creepy old guy” trying to grapple with the lingo and social cues of a totally alien drug subculture. In his most insightful moments, he takes on American entitlement and gluttony, suggests his own complicity in the current sado-masochistic financial kink-fest, and questions our Web-centric need for instant gratification. During a brief hopeful moment, he wonders: “is it possible to fall in love with your own life?” We readers are inclined to say no, having watched so many people over the past year lose jobs and homes. But flawed as our lives can be, we fight for what we want and will do anything—anything—to save ourselves and the people we love. That’s one reason we like our anti-hero—he’s flawed, but he’s a fighter.

And because we like him, we watch Matt’s many dubious decisions with hands half over our eyes, as if we’re watching a slasher flick. (Don’t go through that drug-dealing door, Matt!) He’s surrounded by other characters spanning the hapless spectrum: Chuck, the balding lumber salesman who’s putting the moves on Matt’s wife; Monte, ruler of the local pot plantation (a.k.a. “Piggy, Drug Lord of the Flies”); Dave, futilely cautious lawyer for all major drug transactions; Richard, his financial planner who’s “predictable as coffin shopping”; and a host of others who, like Matt, are desperately trying to make the best of their broken worlds. We can’t bear and yet can’t wait to watch the disaster unfold. Although the story is somewhat predictable—like that slasher flick—it’s told with such wit and insight that we don’t want to put it down.

Beyond his characters, Walter’s strength is the novel’s form. Much as Matt himself lives multiple lives, The Financial Lives of the Poets takes on multiple generic and formal conventions, sliding from sitcom territory to the realm of crime thrillers as lists, screenplay dialogue, and poetry all work in concert to reveal the hidden, ignored complexities of everyday life and the challenge of conveying them through literature. If there is a major fault in The Financial Lives of the Poets, it may be that the premise is completely unconvincing. How could a man who made his living as a business reporter think that Poetfolio.com would be a fiscally sound investment? He’d be either incredibly dumb or incredibly naïve (and evidence for both abounds). Or perhaps it's too great a leap of faith. Can either Matt or Watler really believe this is what poetry can or should do?

Matt's a mediocre poet, but if he were better at it, we probably wouldn't like him as much. We read his blank verse, villanelles, and haikus alongside more familiar, deliciously appropriated bits. Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson, and William Carlos Williams all make cameos (“so much depends upon the red Camaro," for example). Matt initially began Poetfolio.com, he tells us, because “investment poetry would…open the door for a literary discussion of the thing that most of us spent so many days thinking about: our money.” Perhaps only in such a discussion could we begin to make sense of the great mess we’ve gotten into and begin to get out of it.

While reading The Financial Lives of the Poets, I couldn’t help but think of Williams’s famous lines

It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.

Matt’s downfall is triggered partly by a lack of interest in poetry—really, a lack of interest in humanity—and Matt continually reminds us how important poets and poetry are in these fragmented, implosive times:

The truth is that anything you try to own ends up owning you. We’re all just renting…. The poets were supposed to remind us of this, to regulate the existential and temporal markets (Let be be finale of seem. / The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.) and to balance real estate with ethereal state (One not need be a chamber to be haunted, / One need not be a house.) Hell, we don’t need bailouts, rescue packages and public works. We need more poets.

Amen to that.

In this tale of our current financial crisis and our long and compli- cated relationship with po'try, Jess Walter’s creation is hilarious and poignant, sardonic and wise. While indicting our money-obsessed consumer culture, Walter crafts his characters with empathy and care, and we identify with them at their lowest and highest moments. It’s a story of forgiveness and redemption, of triumph and spirit, balanced with a bit of raunch. Though timely and topical, The Financial Lives of Poets will stick around because the cultural crisis of this book—how to make poetry matter, how to get people to care about their own lives and about each other—is timeless. And despite the despair of Matt’s situation, and our own, Walter provides us with some hope, reminding us that while “the edge is so close to where we live….It’s okay. Just keep moving forward. Don’t look back. It’s okay.” And we believe it.

And for those of you lit-entrepreneurs who’ve been thinking “Financial poetry? Brilliant! I could do that...”? Well, Matt’s ill-fated domain, Poetfolio.com, is still available. Snatch it up and live the dream.